"A seven-month San Antonio Express-News investigation into the pervasive and long-standing problem of sex assaults in the military shows victims who report the incidents often are retaliated against and discharged on false claims that they have mental disorders. Offenders, meanwhile, are rarely punished, and most are allowed to stay in the armed forces."
Center for Investigative Reporting
VA’s ability to quickly provide benefits plummets under Obama
“Internal VA documents, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and authenticated by the agency, reveal that delays newly returning veterans face before receiving disability compensation and other benefits are far longer than the agency has publicly acknowledged. The documents also offer insight into some of the reasons for those delays.”
The Houston Chronicle
Pasadena Superfund site's owner indicted, missing
“In reality, prosecutors said, he is a polluter responsible for a 17-acre disaster - hundreds of dumpsters and concrete tanks vaporizing hazardous chemicals into the air ...
An investigation by KING TV in Seattle reveals the federal government has been quietly scaling back a nationwide ballistics network that was once heralded as a high-tech tool to fight gun crime. The television station’s Trail of the Gun investigations previously uncovered thousands of “crime guns” in Washington State that were not subjected to routine ballistics tests that link those guns to unsolved crimes.
Center for Investigative Reporting/Esquire
The Shooter
"The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care."
The Tampa Bay Times
Public schools lose millions to crooks and cheaters
“Axson's case points to a larger problem with mandated tutoring in Florida: The program pays public money to people with criminal records, and to cheaters and profiteers who operate virtually unchecked by state regulators.”
Lobbying preserved millions for Florida tutoring companies
"Every year for nearly a ...
"I would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night," writes Phil Bronstein for the ...
Read more ...Welcome to IRE's roundup of the weekend's many enterprise stories -- the last one of 2012 -- from around the country. We'll highlight the document digging, field work and data analysis that made their way into centerpieces in print, broadcast and online from coast to coast. Did we miss something? Email tips to web@ire.org.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Do teachers’ absences affect student learning?
Seventy-three Western Pennsylvania public school districts paid nearly $25 million for substitute teachers to cover classes when full-time educators were not in the classroom during the last school year, according to records for 17 ...
“For several years now, militant enforcers have scoured the tribal belt in search of informers who help the C.I.A. find and kill the spy agency’s jihadist quarry. The militants’ technique — often more witch hunt than investigation — follows a well-established pattern.”
“BP Plc (BP/)’s temporary ban from new U.S. government work now includes a bit of wiggle room for the Defense Department."
"The data reveals, for the first time, that long wait times are contributing to tens of thousands of veterans being approved for disability benefits and pensions only after it is too late for the money to help them."
"It's rare for the U.S. Navy to acknowledge the veracity of negative reporting about one of its major programs -- especially after denying the earlier investigative reports. But the Navy did just that as detailed in a recent report by Aviation Week -- indeed the service brass gave the reporter unparalleled access to one of its ships and exclusive interviews with admirals to show how reported problems were being addressed."